A new search engine on the Nazi Party that allows German citizens to discover what their relatives did during the Third Reich and the Holocaust has become one of the most prominent trends in Germany and a major topic in local media.
This happened after the U.S. National Archives made publicly accessible 11 million files on about 8.5 million German citizens — nearly one in five Germans at the time. The files are based on Nazi Party records of every citizen who formally joined the party, and were compiled immediately after World War II, after Allied forces interviewed German citizens about their roles and actions under Nazi rule. The goal was to purge German society and institutions of people who had held important and influential positions in the Nazi Party.
The files, available free of charge and without registration on the National Archives website, include full names, dates of birth, professions, places of residence, dates of joining the Nazi Party and membership numbers. In some cases, a photo of the interviewee is also attached to the file. But access has been almost impossible since it went online because millions of Germans want to search for the truth about their own families — a truth that in many cases was hidden from them.
The current effort is thanks to one man: Hans Huber, manager of a paper factory in Munich-Freimann. Toward the end of the war, Huber was ordered to destroy tons of papers containing Nazi Party membership cards. Instead, Huber took all the cards and hid them under garbage cans throughout the factory.
From there, the cards were transferred to the Allies, who moved them to the Document Center in West Berlin. The Allies used them to begin the process of denazifying the country, transferred them to the U.S. archives on microfilm and returned them to Germany’s federal archives in 1990.
Although the German archives digitized the files, they are not accessible there because of Germany’s privacy laws. Under those laws, access to documents is permitted only 10 years after the death of the person named in them, or once 100 years have passed since their birth.
Since the youngest member to join the party was born in 1928, the documents will become accessible in Germany only in 2028.
“It is simply unbelievable that the Americans managed to beat us even in access to Nazi documents,” Gesa Baumann, a journalist from Berlin who in recent weeks discovered several previously unknown details about her grandfather’s involvement in the Nazi Party, told ynet. “But it turns out that in Germany, the privacy rights of Nazis are more important than our right to know what our grandparents did during the Holocaust.”
The lists are not complete. Twenty percent of the cards were lost or destroyed, and many Nazis were simply never registered.
“But this is a start,” Baumann said. “The search is not simple, and even when you find something about your family, you have to cross-check it with other types of searches and research, but it is a starting point. It makes me very angry that the authorities in Germany have prevented, and still prevent, us from accessing this information. It turns out, also judging by the millions of daily visits to the site, that there is enormous demand among many Germans like me to bravely search their family history. This is very important, especially now, with the wave of antisemitism Germany is experiencing.”